PlayStation 2 Gets A Seamless Media Center Makeover

We often see Raspberry Pi boards of various flavors stuck inside vintage computers and the like. [El Gato Guiri] has instead installed one inside a PlayStation 2 Slim, and rather artfully at that. The result is a tidy little media center device.

Pretty tidy, right? All those ports work! Okay, not the memory card slots. But everything else!

The PlayStation 2 was gutted, with a Raspberry Pi 3B installed inside. The original ports on the back, including the USB and Ethernet port, were then wired up to the Pi to make them fully functional. A slot was then cut into the back to allow the HDMI port to be hooked up. The front USB ports work, too, and the optical drive was removed to make way for a 2 TB Toshiba external drive. Adapters are used to make the controller ports work, as well. Finally, a Noctua fan was installed atop the Pi to make sure it never gets too hot.

Whether it’s for watching movies or playing emulated games with the PS2 controllers, the little media center build is sure to do well.

We’ve seen Raspberry Pis stuck in everything from laptops to monitors, as well as plenty of retro hardware too. When a piece of hardware is dead and gone, a Raspberry Pi can be a great way to breathe new life into an attractive old case!

13 thoughts on “PlayStation 2 Gets A Seamless Media Center Makeover

  1. Sigh. No one said the original hardware was working.
    But I agree, a raspberry pi inside a toilet to count flushes would make a more interesting article. Waterproofing the pi in a hostile environment like a toilet is a serious engineering challenge.

    1. And you could integrate sensors into the toilet seat for weighing yourself, and other sensors for measuring elements in your waste for alerting you to health conditions. The Pi could then auto-upload your data to a web API you made for charting the data.

      On the other hand, doing anything related to waste is just a big ewwwwwwwww

      1. Meh… I work as a systems integrator… so I have to deal with other people’s crap (shitty APIs, poorly implemented protocols) all the time.

        Dealing with my own crap would be a refreshing change.

    2. When a game console “doesn’t work”, it can in many cases be worked on with standard electronics troubleshooting, like making sure that the mobo has good capacitors, or reflowing bad junctions. These consoles are generally well built.

    1. The reason to NOT do this is that PS2 can make use of FreeMcBoot. The Pi could instead be used as a SAMBA Server to stream the games over an ethernet connection to the PS2. The PS2 would then run PS2 natively, or PS1 or many other emulators.

      In this way the normally failing components, like the laser, don’t matter.

      A PS3 is even better.

  2. I truly wonder what value these kinds of articles contribute to the overall HaD theme. Couldn’t Lewin find literally anything else than this childish waste of resources to write about?

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